Announcing funding of Binary Bridge

February 15, 2019
News, Recent Investment

The Southwest Angel Network is pleased to announce that the network has led the initial investment in Binary Bridge. The company, under the leadership of Lori Most, has the mission to improve access to healthcare and increase the quality of care in underserved locations, providing software solutions for mobile clinics in remote, low-resource areas. BackpackEMR targets medical teams working in rural areas, Medical teams are not experts in technology, and hiring an IT person or staff is very expensive. Binary Bridge enables teams to focus more of their time and resources on the people they are serving.

Two social-impact investments

October 9, 2018
News, Recent Investment

The Southwest Angel Network is pleased to announce two new investments, in Scriptly Rx and ResilientGrid.

Scriptly Rx

The mission of Scriptly Rx is to help people save money at the pharmacy on prescription medications. With or without insurance, people save up to 90% at 65,000 pharmacies nationwide! Too many people have to choose. Every day people choose between affordable prescriptions and food, or medical care, or clothing –  the list goes on. This is why Scriptly Rx is happy to distribute their savings program through non-profits around the country, in an effort to help ALL residents from having to make that tough choice. Scriptly Rx’s prescription discount program is 100% free to both the users and the non-profits. Scriptly Rx also donates to Feeding America each and every time someone uses Scriptly Rx to save money on their prescriptions. The company’s name was previously GoodNeighbor Rx

ResilientGrid

Resilient Grid provides a situational awareness & advanced visualization solution for utility grid operators, significantly improving decision making and dramatically reducing decision time by operators in times of grid emergencies or natural disaster. Energy management systems are growing more complex, as networks create a multitude of data streams. The ResilientGrid Map is a single pane of glass for all network data streams, improving operator performance and collaboration through visualization, analysis, and collaboration, and provides an architecture and interface built entirely around operator situation awareness and enhanced operator collaboration within, and across, organizations.

Announcing an investment in teleCALM

July 21, 2018
News, Recent Investment

The Southwest Angel Network is pleased to announce that members have invested in teleCALM, which allows family caregivers to control phone usage by family members who face memory or judgment challenges while still allowing those members to continue to use the phone that they are familiar with.  This protects loved one from phone solicitors while keeping them connected to friends and family.

teleCALM is led by husband and wife team, Tavis and Jill Schriefer.

Portfolio company OneSeventeen Media announces platform to help Pre-K through 2 graders

June 8, 2018
News

With school safety and student mental health a national priority after school shootings, Austin-based, AI EdTech company OneSeventeen Media has launched a mobile-delivered mental health and behavior management tool for elementary schools. The ThinkingApp pilot launched May 2018 at the request of Austin ISD in direct response to a new law by the Texas State Legislature prohibiting behavioral expulsions of PreK – 2 graders.

See the Built-in Austin article.

ThinkingApp employs intelligent, adaptable machine learning to tailor advice to a child’s specific needs, helping them make wiser decisions. The platform assesses emotional and mental states, enabling students to process difficult emotions, understand their behaviors, and navigate those of others, while adults receive real-time, in-depth insight into what is on a child’s mind. Whereas many school safety solutions are reactive, ThinkingApp is based on trauma-informed, restorative and social-emotional learning (SEL) principles to provide real-time “emotional digital triage”™ for upset students before they escalate damaging behaviors, engendering a safer learning environment for all students.

OneSeventeen Media’s solution for PreK – 2 graders is smartly disguised as engaging, interactive eBook stories meant to transform this age group’s misbehaviors. Underpinning the powerful backend-technology are algorithms that deliver evidence-based, restorative exercises for creating safer campuses and inclusive learning environments to improve student mental health, school safety, attendance, and grades while reducing lost teaching time.

Backed by seven years of third-party, evidence-based research, components of the technology resulted in a “statistically significant reduction in students’ emotional distress.” One school reported a 77% decrease in alternative school transfers, preserving more than $100k while averting a potential school shooting. The real-time, actionable insights provided about a troubled student are a nod to the study’s observation that students share five times more information via the apps than they do in face-to-face interactions – data that makes OneSeventeen Media’s work crucial to today’s urgent need for improved school safety.

Cedars International’s Les Simpson noted, “the apps provide a secure way to de-escalate classroom drama, enabling teachers to focus less on discipline and more on teaching.”
For more information and to deploy ThinkingApp and reThinkIt!, visit www.oneseventeenmedia.com.

The Southwest Angel Network invests in DayOne Response

May 15, 2018
News, Recent Investment

The Southwest Angel Network is pleased to join angel network Golden Seeds in investing in DayOne Response, which was founded and is headed by Tricia Compas-Markman.

Addressing the vital need for clean water in disaster relief situations, DayOne Response has developed one solution called the DayOne Waterbag. This is a 10-litre personal water purification unit that can be transported like a backpack. A closed system, which prevents contamination, it is designed specifically to be distributed after a disaster. It purifies 10 litres of water in 30 minutes, and is reusable so a family of four can have clean drinking water for up to 2 months.

Tricia has a civil engineering background with 6-years’ experience working on water treatment technologies for developing countries, such as Thailand, Nicaragua, and Haiti. Tricia is co-inventor of the DayOne Waterbag and her work has been recognized by President Clinton. She is an Unreasonable Institute fellow, recipient of the Junior Chamber International, Osaka Outstanding Young Person’s Award for social innovation, Creativity Foundation legacy prize winner, a North America Finalist for the Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards, 2013 Engineers Without Borders Outstanding member, a Pipeline Fellow investee, and a 2014 “Mother of Invention”. Tricia received her BS in Civil Engineering and MS in Civil/Environmental Engineering from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.

An Investment in start-up Accelerist

March 28, 2018
News, Recent Investment

The Southwest Angel Network is pleased to announce that it has led the investment in Accelerist. Accelerist is the industry’s only matchmaking and measurement platform for companies and causes. The relationship between companies and social causes is powerful. Accelerist believes profit and purpose partnerships mean too much in today’s world to leave it to chance and circumstance. Through a deep data-driven approach, the Accelerist platform helps companies find the right partners and measure their impact on the company’s mission, stakeholders and bottom line. Accelerist’s company name previously was Catalist.

Accelerist was co-founded by and is led by CEO Brittany Hill. As a data seeker and trend translator, Brittany specializes in using analytics and innovations to connect companies and causes to do more good in the world. Brittany leads the product and business development efforts at Accelerist – the online matchmaking platform for companies and causes. As a nonprofit entrepreneur, Brittany is behind some of the industry’s newest products and tools that help nonprofits elevate their mission.

Brittany’s extensive background in the nonprofit and agency supports her vision for nonprofit innovations. Mrs. Hill has built multi-channel partnerships and award-winning campaigns with some of the most notable blue-chip nonprofit organizations (American Heart Association, UNICEF, Marine Toys for Tots Foundation, Make-A-Wish International) and corporate brands (Pepsico, General Mills, Hasbro, Best Buy).

An Investment in start-up company Family Plan

March 16, 2018
News, Recent Investment

The Southwest Angel Network has made an investment in Family Plan, which works to reduce the stress on a family following a divorce.  Using Family Plan, parents can manage custody scheduling on a shared calendar in real time, arrange and make payments instantaneously and with authentication, and make and log texts and emails to support open communication and maintain a reliable record. No other mobile app provides this suite of functions. This app has been developed with input from a team of divorced parents, divorce lawyers, and ex-judges to address both an important social need and a large market opportunity.

Family Plan was founded and is led by Mark and Laura MacMahon, from Maine, who founded the company for the same reason many companies are founded – they had a problem they wanted to solve, and the available solutions just weren’t good enough. In the years after Mark’s divorce, he found that he was spending hours a week just trying to stay on top of managing his schedule, finances, and communications all related to the kids. Mark and Laura decided to build a set of tools that would help families thrive after a breakup – reducing conflict along the way.

Supporting Austin Title 1 High-school Students

March 16, 2018
News

Members of the Southwest Angel Network were mentors in the recently completed Greater Austin Hispanic Chamber of Commerce’s Superstars Competition. This program helps students at five Austin Title 1 high schools to develop start-up company business plans and presentation skills.

At the recent city-wide final competition, our network awarded the Social-Impact award to Maria Hernandez and Lizett Abrego, pictured below. They are students at the Travis Early College High School.  

At our May 9th dinner pitch event, in addition to hearing the normal company pitches, Maria and Lizett will be presenting us their business plan for their company “Hope”.

Furthermore, our network has raised a college scholarship fund through the recent Amplify Austin giving day, and we will present the scholarship to Maria and Lizett at the meeting.

The Southwest Angel Network is not your ordinary angel network. We care deeply about social-impact and we strongly support diverse management teams. And yes, we also seek to make a return on our investments.

 

“Efficacy” is my new favorite, social-impact word

January 24, 2018
Blogs

From the desk of Bob Bridge.

Efficacy is defined as “the ability to produce a desired or intended result”.

It is often used to describe the effectiveness of pharmaceuticals. Does this drug demonstrate the expected impact on a certain disease? And is the drug effective in a large percentage of the treated patients?

The Southwest Angel Network, which focuses on social impact companies, sees many companies who are working earnestly and diligently to address significant societal or environmental challenges. The questions that I ask of the companies include, “Can you provide evidence of the impact-efficacy of your product or service?” and “What is the magnitude of your impact on society?”

For example, most of us would agree that early STEM education for under-represented populations is beneficial to society. Such training should increase the lifetime earning of those under-represented individuals who are today under-represented in technology fields. And technology companies should benefit from having a larger and more under-represented employee pool to draw from.

Consider a company that comes to us waving the STEM impact flag. They state that their STEM education lab tools are significantly cheaper than those of their competitors, and so our network should fund them. Our requests include:

  • Please show us evidence that your product offering has a higher efficacy in terms of improving educational outcomes compared to competing products. When a market segment has many competing products to choose from, what is the impact on educational outcomes of adding one more product to the mix?
  • One requirement for having a significant impact on STEM educational outcomes is being able to have a company’s offering adopted by the largest possible number of classrooms. So please show us evidence that your sales plan has efficacy in terms of penetrating the tough-to-sell-to-education market.

Consider a company that comes to us and states that they can reduce prescription medication prices for low-income individuals, allowing millions of individuals to pay for the medications that they need. What a wonderful idea! The efficacy question is, “Can you reduce the prices far enough to actually enable significantly more people to pay for their meds?”

Consider a company that comes to us and states that they can improve financial security in retirement for people who are today in their 50s. They accomplish this by offering a comprehensive and well-thought-out online retirement planning tool. Efficacy questions include:

  • Do you have evidence that your tools change the spending, savings, and/or investment behaviors of your tool users? Without a change in behavior, there is no societal impact.
  • Consumers today have a wide range of retirement products and services available to them. Can you demonstrate that your tools have higher efficacy than the plethora of competing options in terms of improving financial retirement outcomes?
  • After you have demonstrated that your tools have high efficacy, can you now please describe the efficacy of your go-to-market plan? If not many folks use your tools the overall social-impact is small.

Bob Bridge, Executive Director

National recognition for the Southwest Angel Network

November 22, 2017
News

Bob Bridge, the angel network’s Executive Director, has been recognized nationally as a leader in social impact investing. Bob recently served on a Social Impact panel at the recent national ACA  Leadership Conference in Houston. Bob has also been invited to moderate a panel discussion on “The Growth of Impact Investing” program at the ACA’s April national Summit in Boston.

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